“Mike. Come. London is groaning with lust.”
This was an oft repeated refrain I had heard and was to hear from Gainor. And as I headed off to Liverpool, taking the steam packet boat slicing through the waves, with mooing cattle aboard, I imagined Crist to be in even greater love and financial embroilments than he had been in Dublin. Meanwhile, the steamer headed up the Mersey and docked under the great outstretched wings of the birds on top of the Liver building. And I boarded the train that went out from the big black station of Lime Street and on between blackened walls and through the bleak, gray industrial wastelands of the Midlands. Arriving in my Manx tweeds, and with chamois gloves agrip of my luggage, I holed up in the Hotel Russell, this great massive structure in Bedford Square not far from Euston Station, where I had many a time arrived and departed over the years. Often choosing to stay in the district from which I would invariably wander southwestward into Soho, Mayfair and beyond.
Gainor Stephen Crist and Desmond MacNamara and those folk associated with same were on the other side of London in the area of Earl’s Court and Lexham Gardens. I taxied across and descended down into MacNamara’s dungeonlike quarters, where Gainor would arrive by day to lie down supine on the floor and eat the cast-off bacon rinds and other crusts thrown his way while waiting for news of his father’s death in Dayton, Ohio, who, in the final days of a long illness, was now sinking rapidly. As a diagnostician, he had been a physician of some repute, known throughout the Midwest and was rumored to be a reasonably wealthy man. He was married to his third wife, his second wife being Gainor’s mother. If a third wife did not leave much anticipation of considerable riches, there was nevertheless thought to be sufficient of an inheritance for Gainor to clear all his debts and have enough left to provide for some years of future comfort. And all would be better than well upon his father’s demise.
During this distant deathwatch, Gainor’s circumstances were at their lowest. Beset as he was on every side by seemingly unsolvable domestic matters. And with his life kept more in suspended animation than ever, he was hand-rubbingly, overwhelmingly glad to see me and drink bitter beer in the most momentous of pub crawls. Which included such shabbily exotic places as the Gargoyle and Mandrake clubs in Soho. But the first visit was to a pub known as the Bear Pit, so named because of its outside circular iron-fenced enclosure, which appeared only minus a bear within its confines. This pub was closest to where Desmond MacNamara lived, and upon whom all manner of people without a place to stay descended. MacNamara, with his strange leprechaunish image, was a lifelong vegetarian as well as one of Dublin’s great sculptors, papier-mâché artists and puppeteers. He was also a worldwide center of communication, rumor and gossip, none of which was rumor or gossip but all of which was invariably true. And could give you as much of this truth as you might want or were able to digest. Always accompanied by sage remarks to guide the unwary. He remained one of the few people upon whom Behan, in the remainder of his short life, would always rely.
At the time of my visit to MacNamara’s studio, his walls were variously decorated with his papier-mâché heads of friends accompanied by their sculptured winged male erected organs of regeneration. He was then in the process of making costumes for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and had a room full of outerwear that could disguise you as a donkey, monkey, elephant or kangaroo. Suits of this last beast being the most easily fitted to our size, we set off in such on our pub crawl, courtesy of the grand arrival of none other than the bold-spirited Valentine Coughlin. And now scented with fragrances, cutting a dazzling figure, sporting his bowler hat, black kidskin gloves and rolled brolly. However, he remembered the many slights he’d received from such as the poetic intelligentsia back in Dublin, and such, if they persisted in seeking Coughlin’s company, were given short shrift.
“Fuck off now, you of little faith, who wouldn’t speak to me when I was cleaning the pissoirs back in the Iveagh House in Dublin and are now trying to stick your noses up my rich rear end, out of which are coming nuggets of gold.”
As we drove off in his sumptuous limousine, Valentine, a kangaroo on each side of him, lounged back in the soft upholstery and roared with laughter. He was in cahoots with an equally elegant Pakistani gentleman who was never without his own gloves or his platinum-topped sword stick. Together, the latter and Coughlin had now, in a few short months, set up shell companies in Switzerland, where they pretended to export nylons free of one hundred percent duty and tax but which they in fact sent in lorry loads to be sold in southern coastal towns like Bournemouth and Brighton. And once, in emergency command of a lorry load himself, Coughlin hit a cow wandering out of a field, the lorry careering off the road to land in and become stuck in a ditch. Too late in the darkness to extricate it, Coughlin applied to and got the local constabulary to come and stand guard over it through the night while Val, one of Scotland Yard’s most wanted men, retired to the nearest pub hotel to celebrate the evening away with the village locals.
It was a night of euphoria. Until one of the last pub visits came in Soho. And produced the grand finale. Where in some inebriation and following the singing of songs out of the kangaroo mouths there came some anti-British remarks. In spite of our little group being generally Anglophiles, exception was taken to cries of “No joy, no juice, you pigs no use.” And these words seemingly finding us accused of being Oxford intellectuals. A momentous pub battle erupted. I got clonked on the head, remembering only that there seemed to be a staircase that descended directly into the pub and those who tried to get up it to escape the fray all came rapidly airborne back down. Attired in his kangaroo at the top of the steps stood Eddie Connell, who’d spent ten years in prison for trying to blow up the Hammersmith Bridge over the Thames. But even he was then begrudgingly pro-British, being at the time the lamplighter, who by evening lit the gas lamps on the approaches to Kensington Palace. And he was, later in life, like a few other IRA men of the time, to become a civil servant and a respected member of the British establishment.
Unconscious bodies lay over the pub floor, including, for a few moments my own. I lost my passport. And just in time before the police arrived, the little group of kangaroo-clad gentlemen were chauffeured by Coughlin to be treated in St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital, where, with members of the hospital staff as an audience, much mirth ensued. I later found myself awaking somewhere in Gunterstone Road in West Kensington in the company of Crist, various ladies and several hungover IRA men. My next task being to submit myself to the American embassy for a new passport, where one underwent a lengthy interrogation by a careful young consul who viewed my bearded person with considerable suspicion and who, among other questions upon hearing I served in the U.S. Navy, asked with even greater suspicion for my naval serial number, which I said I could not remember. Whereupon I was immediately informed,
“No one ever forgets their naval serial number.”
One sat now feeling being the communist spy the consul thought I was. And also now uncheerful with the prospect of having my trip canceled and my return to the U.S.A. long delayed. And then suddenly as I sat there, ready to berate this prying gentleman too ardent at his job, a number came sailing totally out of the deep blue into mind.
“Nine zero nine, five nine, zero eight.”
“Ah. Yes. And let me see. Yes. Numbers in that range would just fit in with the time you enlisted in the navy.”
As it turned out, I much later discovered my thoughtful IRA acquaintances had found my passport but thought it more valuable for other uses. And now following one’s fresh windswept life in Ireland and the Isle of Man, London made one feel claustrophobic with its endless communities of terraced houses and streets, which lay flatly under oppressive gray skies and loomed out of its smoky mists and fogs. I even found relief in the relative openness of Kensington High Street, one of London’s wider boulevards, where, following attendance at Crist’s insistence at a pub called The Live and Let Live, we finally walked to this thoroughfare for lunch and spoke for hours together over our br
andy and coffee. We went to sit too in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where Gainor related the debacles of his recent times and love trysts in Dublin. I remembered calling to the last house he lived in up a cul-de-sac in Glenageary, where one walked in the unlocked front door. And finding it with no one home, forlornly empty and deserted. A John Ryan drawing of me still hanging on the wall in the hall. Stacks of dirty dishes all over the kitchen. Soiled clothes, books and papers strewn everywhere. A chill damp throughout the house. A feeling of loss overcoming one, sensing that the life lived up in this little cul-de-sac had come to its end. And making Ireland seem a lonely, abandoned grave of dreams.
But during my stay in London, it happened. The long, patiently awaited event. Gainor’s father was dead. And at the same time this news reached him, Gainor also received by special delivery a long letter which Gainor’s father wrote in his last days. This when eagerly opened meticulously recounted a litany of Gainor’s indiscretions, and his improvidence, misdemeanors, misdeeds and misbehavior over the years. In the summation of which Gainor’s indifference to his father’s authority was singled out. And which therefore, for Gainor’s own good, it had been reluctantly decided to leave Gainor nothing in his will. Gainor slowly and stoically tore the letter into the very tiniest of tiny pieces, retaining a small pile in the palm of his hand which were ceremoniously put into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, as he murmured in Spanish,
“Hasta la muerte, todo es vida.”
Even this fatal and drastic news seemed not to totally discourage Gainor. In fact it seemed to be an even greater reason for him to soldier on. And I remembered that Gainor told me that three things had been traumatic in his life. Once when he had badly broken his arm, which when briefly shown to his father hurrying to an appointment, it was suggested he should go have a hot bath. Gainor later having to be brought to hospital with a serious fracture. Then as a young boy he found himself waiting frightened in a dark hospital corridor outside a private room, wherein his mother had just died. Reluctant to go in, Gainor’s father made him enter and then to go and kiss his mother’s cold lips as she lay dead in her hospital bed. An only child of this beautiful woman, tears came to Gainor’s eyes, relating this haunting moment of his life. I learned of another trauma when walking with Crist to the west of Ireland when he stopped abruptly and asked me what was that thing on the road ahead. I went on farther to see, and returned to say it was a dead bird. Gainor then detoured off the road through the fields to circumvent the spot, and soaking his feet slogging through a bog. He then told me that when growing up in Dayton he had been sent on his birthday what he thought was a birthday present. A beautifully wrapped shoe box which had come in the mail. Unwrapping the anonymously sent gift and lifting off the cover, inside the box, and carefully swaddled in white, was a dead sparrow.
February in this fatal year of 1952 and before the disappointment not expected to come, Valerie, Philip and I got on the plane for Dublin to stay at the Shelbourne Hotel. And in those days, although beginning to dwindle in number, there were still a few of your hysterically pukka and tweedy, horsey folk about. Some so rigidly Anglo-Irish that they resembled human hawthorns strutting the lobby. Where hunt members, their vowels ringing out, would read off the fox hunting fixtures posted on the hotel lobby walls. At eleven-fifteen on this morning, I took champagne in the quiet peace of the flowered, upholstered residential lounge. An old friend of Trinity days, Jim Walsh, turned up. A six-foot four-inch gentleman of wry humor, he was an abstemious Trinity scholar, who, from the dining hall pulpit, rattled off Latin grace before evening commons, his one free meal a day. He otherwise kept himself alive counting out so many cornflakes each morning for breakfast. And curing a stammer with a splendid English accent, there was always a steely hard truth underlying the words he spoke. Then Ernest Gebler came into town in his MG sports car, and we dined under the Shelbourne’s crystal chandeliers. Now, with all decisions past and committed to one’s fate, and despite Gebler’s warning words, America was already looming in the mind as a bright and beckoningly shiny place across the sea.
Meanwhile, Behan on his meandering travels en route through England and trying in some way to save fifteen pounds on a fare to Paris, spent a week remanded behind the grim, forbidding walls of Lewes Jail in Sussex. And upon his appearance in court, a lawyer found to represent him waxed eloquent to the judge in his defense, saying he was a model responsible citizen, successful poet, and a promising writer who contributed to Irish radio and published in Irish newspapers and was as a budding dramatist even being considered as a potential contributor to the BBC. Then, as Behan’s counsel was about to launch into further and better particulars concerning his client’s cultural bona fides, he was interrupted by the bench, the judge remarking,
“Yes, your model responsible citizen client served eight years in custody in 1940, three years in 1946, sentenced to death in 1945 in Ireland and commuted to twelve years penal servitude. Twice ordered out of Britain by the home secretary. Served twelve days for drunk and disorderly last month, etcetera, etcetera. I must say to you counsel that your model citizen client sounds to me a very dangerous man indeed. I order fifteen pounds fine and that he be immediately taken to the Dover boat and deported and advise that he does not return to this country.”
Of course, Behan, no longer persona non grata, and proud of his Borstal and prison days, did return to England to be celebrated and feted throughout the land. But this was to be a few years on yet from the moment approaching now when I was departing from this Dublin upon whose gray granite, wet streets one had walked many a mile, detouring into battles of hate and entwining in moments of love. And one was now recalling the letters I had received from a fellow American Trinity student, who early disappeared off on the grand tour and who wrote from the deepest jungles of Africa, imploring I not return to the United States. But the die was cast by tickets and trunks. And by my family in the northern reaches of the Bronx, already awaiting their wayward, iconoclastic son, whose outspoken letters in order to be read to others had long now had to be censored. Even to the point of my father taking a scissors to excise the more defiantly dissident words.
And not
For the first
Nor last time
Would my averments
Be so treated
13
THE DRUMS WERE BEATING. America each day across the big water coming closer. That home sweet home where all was well, which was God-blessed and thought-shining in its glory to the West. Where all the good things were against the bad. Where our lives were early lived with radiant promise ahead to be fulfilled. Where one might open one’s heart to what magic, what joy. Where doctors would do all to save a life by merely putting their stethoscopes over one’s wallet. Where fairness and humanity could be found in unexpected places. And there was endless room to move across the valleys, mountains, deserts and plains of this massively great victorious America in whose defense our fists flew to avenge on the spot any insult to its flag or people. And yet at this time came ominous messages that one saw in letters being sent out from that land. That something was amiss. That a secretly pernicious evil had already taken hold and was beginning to pervade from coast to coast. But in remembering America from an earlier time, one did not wholly take in this certain hint of warning.
My pictures, watercolors and oils had preceded me to the boat in a big black box, traveling down that lonely, boggy coastland past the little cottage and barn where they had been painted. From the Shelbourne we went by train to Cork, changing there to proceed the few miles farther out along to the harbor and weatherbeaten town of Cobh, where we stayed the night in one of your better hotels ready to board the America in the morning.
Dining that evening in the hotel, and served dinner by a waiter who ceremoniously swayed back and forth as he placed our plates, Valerie sitting across from me, having just left Philip in his carrycot asleep in the bedroom, suddenly had a premonition that something was wrong and jumped up and rushed off. To find that
the maid, turning down the bed and drawing the curtains, had thrown a raincoat over the carrycot completely covering it and baby Philip, who would have in a few more minutes been smothered while he slept. It was Valerie’s last contact with Ireland, a place she never felt entirely at home in, and despite the general friendliness given her charm and beauty, she had to remain always conscious of the slight hostility to her Englishness. It was too to be our last association with Ireland, the Emerald Isle, as a family.
Some folk oblivious of the artistic problem of producing aesthetic balance regarded such a canine picture as obscene. Happily, not all were so dismayed, for such as my publisher Seymour Lawrence sported one of my priapic dogs on the wall of his publishing office in Boston.
By tender, we traveled out on a chill, breezy morning to the black steep sides of the America anchored in the bay of Cobh, the last port of call of the ill-fated Titanic before it sank out on the cold Atlantic. Indulging a slight inclination for privilege and at the same time exercising one’s conservative nature in practical matters, we traveled cabin-class. And I was to recall that in coming to Ireland initially, one would have done so first-class, due to that strange confine, the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, which was frequented by many a distinguished naval gentleman. For in hearing that I was off to Ireland, Commodore Harry Manning gave me a note to take down to Broadway when booking my ticket. As I did so, and never having been on a liner before, I asked the clerk what difference the commodore’s note made. The eager-to-please man seemed surprised that I was unaware that, as Commodore Manning was at the time the ship’s captain, I would be given the very best accommodation aboard. However, at the time there occurred a prolonged shipping strike and, following a series of false starts over a period of three days, I ended up flying to Ireland instead.
The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Page 14
